


White Christmas

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Babies, Christmas, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Holidays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-17 21:37:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16982256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: A few years post-canon, Peggy fishes Jack out of a jail cell and takes him home for Christmas.





	White Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spinning_yarns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinning_yarns/gifts).



The DC city jail was not a place where Peggy had intended to find herself stopping on her way home from the office on Christmas Eve, but, well, here she was. Furling her umbrella, she walked out of gathering darkness and a gloomy December drizzle into a dreary waiting room half-filled with drunk people. Someone had attempted to liven the atmosphere by tacking up a droopy-looking garland above the door. In Peggy's opinion it didn't help much.

It took her some time to catch the eye of the harried desk sergeant, and still more time to convince him first of all that she was a federal agent, and second that she was here on official business. Eventually he gave her some forms to sign, and summoned up a beat cop to take her into the back.

Jack was crammed into a cell with half a dozen drunks, slouched on a bench looking miserable, as far away from the rest of them as he could get. He was dressed like a hobo and far, far wetter than the rain outside could account for. At the sight of Peggy appearing on the other side of the bars, he managed to look hopeful, embarrassed, and upset at the same time.

"Yes, that's him," Peggy said. She had come in here with every intention of taking him to task for being the cause of an unpleasant errand when all she wanted to do was go home, kiss her husband, and take her shoes off, but he looked so abjectly miserable that she even suppressed the smile that tugged at the corner of her mouth at the sight of him. The corridor was not warm, and the cells no doubt were colder.

"Took your time getting here," Jack said, and her sympathy cooled somewhat. 

"This man works for you?" The duty officer glanced skeptically between Peggy in her crisp suit and heels, and Jack in the cell in his dripping hobo-wear.

"I assure you, he is a federal agent, difficult though it might be to believe at the moment," Peggy said. Jack wrung out his hat (not his usual stylish fedora; this was a flat woolen slouch cap) and gave her a disgruntled look through the bars. "He doesn't have ID because he was on an undercover assignment. Do you intend to release him into my custody before or after the man catches his death?"

There were some more forms to sign, and then they were turned out onto the street.

"When you said on the phone that you fell into the Potomac," Peggy said, "you were being quite truthful, I see."

Jack still looked intensely grouchy, but his mood had lightened noticeably as soon as the door to the station closed behind them, although his teeth were still chattering. "Yeah, it hasn't really been the greatest day." He cleared his throat. "Thanks for coming to get me, in case I forgot to say it earlier."

"You did, but it's taken as given." She opened the door of her car. "Jack, where am I taking you?"

"Uh ..." It was clear this thought had not occurred to him either. "Well, this morning I was in New York. Or maybe that was yesterday morning. Then I was on a train in pursuit of a Leviathan agent, then I was here, then I was in the river ... I don't even have a toothbrush closer than New York." He looked briefly dazed. "Train station, I guess. Yeah, that'll work."

"Jack ..." she began. He looked exhausted, she realized, more so than she'd noticed inside. "It's Christmas Eve."

"Oh? I guess it was yesterday morning then." He grimaced at the look on her face. "I can sleep on the train, be home by morning. No big deal."

"Or," she said, as she put the car in gear, "I could take you home with me."

There was a brief silence. Jack leaned forward to hold his hands over the car's hot-air vents, not looking at her. "I don't want to crash your Christmas."

"Don't be absurd. We have a perfectly good guest room that's never used. And you can meet Elizabeth."

"Isn't Elizabeth a baby?" Jack looked distinctly uncomfortable. "How much conversation can she be capable of?"

"She's nearly a year old --" She had to pause for a moment; how was it possible, already? "... and she knows three words, I believe. Four words if Daniel is correct that she can actually say 'pony' now."

She glanced sideways, and couldn't help grinning at the expression on his face. He looked more like a man going to a torture session than a Christmas dinner.

"You know I'm not much of a family man, right, Carter?"

"Think about it this way," Peggy said. "It's better than spending the night on a bench in a train station."

 

***

 

The thought did occur to her as she pulled up out front that she hadn't warned Daniel. Oh well, he was used to being on the receiving end of (as he would put it) curve balls.

"Daniel?" she called, opening the door.

"In here," his voice filtered down from upstairs. "I'm giving Libby her bath."

Jack looked around curiously, and with increasing amounts of interest, at the holiday decorations and the small but passable Christmas tree. "I didn't take you for the homemaker type, Marge."

"It's mostly Mr. Jarvis. The Jarvises watch Elizabeth while Daniel and I are at work. There was also quite a nice menorah in the window earlier this month." She noticed, rather too late, that Jack was leaving muddy footprints in the hall. Oh well, it wouldn't be the first time the floor had mud tracked on it. "I'll just get you some of Daniel's things and a towel."

Daniel appeared at the top of the stairs just then with baby Elizabeth wrapped in a fluffy bath towel. He stopped, and slowly grinned. "Well, look what the cat dragged in. Peg, you didn't tell me Jack was down from New York. What the hell happened to you, anyway?"

"The Potomac happened to me." Jack stared warily at the baby, who stared back with wide brown eyes.

"Jack can wear some of your things, can't he, Daniel?"

"Yeah, I don't see why not. There's hot coffee in the kitchen," he added, and Jack's eyes lit up. "And I'll put on water for tea, Peg. The Red Rose or the Earl Grey?"

"Earl Grey, please. Thank you."

Jack glanced at Daniel, at her, and then nervously trailed her through the house while Peggy collected towels and an armful of Daniel's clothes. 

"Would you stop looking like you're going to a funeral? It's only a baby. I've seen you face down Leviathan and Hydra and senatorial committees without half this level of unnecessary stress. It's not as if we're going to make you change a diaper."

"I don't _mind_ babies," Jack said, taking the towels she handed him. "It's just the whole thing. You and Sousa ... you're -- _domestic."_

Peggy failed to squash a smile. "I do still hit people with staplers, occasionally."

"Ha ha."

 

***

 

She found Daniel in the kitchen, leaning on the counter and making her tea with the baby tucked into the crook of his arm. He relinquished Elizabeth to her gratefully. By this point Daniel was skilled at moving around the house without needing a crutch, but not while carrying a small, squirming human being.

There was a large plate of gingerbread men on the counter, lovingly decorated and no doubt courtesy of the Jarvises. Peggy bit into one.

"So, what _is_ Jack doing down here in DC, anyway?" Daniel asked, adding what she knew would be precisely the right amount of sugar to her tea.

"Rather a long story, I gather, which he is probably the one to tell." She accepted the cup of tea he handed her. "I dredged him out of jail -- also part of the long story -- and brought him here despite his insistence on being taken to the bus station."

"What, soaking wet? Good God, no."

"My reaction exactly, thank you." She curled her fingers around the hot mug of tea. She was chilled herself, and tired from a long day at SHIELD, albeit a day with far more meetings and paperwork than stapler-hitting, as was her lot these days. (Not that she wouldn't mind hitting a bureaucrat or two with a stapler, but then she'd have to deal with the fallout and clean up the mess, which took the fun out of it.)

"Talking about me behind my back?" Jack asked, slouching into the kitchen. He looked somewhat less flattened than earlier, however, all the more so when he located the coffeepot and doctored his cup generously from the bottle of rum on the counter.

"It's how you pay room and board around here," Daniel said, and Peggy laughed into her tea. "There's food, by the way -- thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Jarvis, since I was at the office 'til mid-afternoon. I've already eaten. I wasn't sure how late you'd be out."

Guilt tugged at her. "I meant to call. I didn't know I'd be this late."

"I distracted her with my ill-timed sojourn into the city lock-up," Jack put in, unexpectedly coming to her rescue, sort of. "You said something about food?"

The Jarvises being the Jarvises, there was excellent roast beef and potatoes (warmed in the oven), bread and slices of cake for dessert. There was also enough to feed a dozen people.

Conversation over dinner was light. Daniel held the baby while the other two ate. After nearly falling asleep after her bath, she'd perked up again and was watching the stranger with fascinated eyes. Jack, Peggy was amused to note, was becoming more and more fascinated with the baby in return.

"Hey kid," Jack said, during a lull in the conversation. He took his napkin and folded it briskly like a flower, spreading out the folds. Elizabeth watched all of this with the wide eyes that reminded Peggy more and more of the ones she saw in the mirror every day.

Jack danced the napkin in front of her eyes, pulled it away (to a delighted giggle) and then produced a penny from behind it, making her laugh.

By now Peggy had abandoned her food, and Daniel was staring openly; the baby wasn't the only one who was fascinated.

"Where'd you learn that, anyway?" Daniel asked.

"A girl in the USO show." Jack grinned. "I got a backstage tour and everything --"

"Jack!" Daniel covered Elizabeth's ears, at the same time as Peggy said, amused, "Please spare us the details."

Jack grinned and looked pleased with himself. He looked less pleased when Daniel deposited Elizabeth in his lap.

"Hey, wait a minute --"

"Since you're her new favorite person, you can hold her while Peg and I get the dishes."

Peggy watched sharply at first, alert for disaster, but the worst thing that happened was that Jack spent most of the time they were washing up trying to teach Libby to say his name. By the time Peggy came back to the table to take his plate, the child was drooped over his arm, falling asleep, and Jack was holding her in a very uncertain way as if he had an unexploded grenade.

"Difficult as it is to believe, Jack, I think you are actually good with children," Peggy said, transferring the half-asleep baby from his lap to her arms without waking her up. (She'd had a lot of practice by now.)

"Aren't babies supposed to cry more than this?" Jack said. "I think you got a defective one, Marge. Or you broke it."

Peggy narrowed her eyes at him, holding Libby against her shoulder. Jack grinned. "I'm putting her down upstairs," she said. "You can help Daniel finish up."

"I've been demoted to chief cook and bottle-washer?" Jack was saying when she left the room.

"Don't you mean just bottle-washer?" Daniel shot back. "Unless you've learned to cook lately."

"Touché."

Peggy smiled as she went up the darkened stairs. It was odd how, despite seeing so little of each other over the last couple of years, they could so easily fall back into the old rapport they'd shared while working together at the SSR and in SHIELD's early days.

At least when they weren't trying to strangle each other.

She laid Libby down carefully in the crib. The little girl mumbled nonsense to herself as Peggy covered her with a fluffy blanket and tucked her stuffed pony beside her -- including a word that sounded suspiciously like "Yack."

"We shall keep this strictly between us," Peggy murmured. She hovered over the crib, waiting until the child settled into deeper sleep, before she left and went back downstairs.

When she came back down, the kitchen was neat as a pin and the men had retired to the living room, Daniel with a cup of coffee, Jack with a glass of whiskey. There was a glass of her favorite wine on the kitchen counter. Peggy refolded a kitchen towel (Daniel always left them crumpled; she wasn't sure why it bothered her when she could leave the bedroom furniture covered with her own rumpled laundry, but somehow it did) and then retrieved the wine and went out to the living room.

"Radio says it's going to snow later," Daniel said, sliding over to make room on the couch.

"It felt like it out there." Peggy settled beside him. The window was beaded with rain; it still wasn't falling hard, but misting lightly, just enough to make the whole world damp and chilly. At least it was warm in here. Their next house would need to have a fireplace, she thought.

"Tell me about it," Jack said with feeling.

"Yes, you never did tell me how you managed to fall in the river."

"I just told Sousa the story," Jack complained, but launched into it again, embellishing in the telling.

"I think this story gained about six Russian spies from the last time I heard it," Daniel remarked as Jack wound up for the finale, involving a foot chase along the river and a boat that moved the wrong way at the last minute.

Peggy got up to refill their depleted drinks. "Please do keep your voices down. Whoever wakes up the baby gets to put her back to sleep."

"Jack," Daniel said promptly.

"What?"

"You. I'm volunteering you. I never thought I'd say this, but you're surprisingly good with babies."

"One," Jack said. "One baby. Singular. And you two have a weird baby, which doesn't surprise me."

"Well, I know who we're getting to babysit the next time the Jarvises can't make it," Daniel said, and then laughed aloud at Jack's look of horror.

Peggy turned from the sideboard where she was pouring drinks. "Look," she said quietly. "The radio was right. It is snowing."

She went to the window, where snow was piling up on the fence and covering the backyard. A moment later, Daniel's arm slid around her waist and he rested his head on her shoulder. Jack drifted up as well, and took the refreshed drink from her hand.

"It's after midnight, right?" he said, and raised his glass. "Merry Christmas." They clinked glasses, and Jack added, "I hope none of you are expecting gifts."

"Don't worry, Jack," Daniel said. "We know you too well by now."

That was the cue, it seemed, to break up the party for the night. Peggy pointed Jack in the direction of the guest bedroom and made sure there were sheets on the bed (and removed some assorted boxes that had taken up residence on the bed in the meantime).

"If there's anything you need, towels or such, feel free to use it." She hesitated, and then hugged him briefly before he could stop her, a quick arm around his neck, there and gone. Jack looked startled. Peggy assumed they were most likely in agreement on mutually never mentioning it again.

"Good night, Peggy," he said as she left.

"Good night, Jack. Merry Christmas."

In the upstairs hallway, there was lamplight spilling out of the baby's room. She found Daniel bending over the crib. "She was awake," he said very softly as Peggy joined him. "I didn't see any reason to bother you. She's out again now." He looked up at her. "Also, unless it was my imagination, I think she said 'Jack' when she saw me."

"Shhh. We are never telling him."

"Never," Daniel agreed, and Peggy slipped an arm around his waist and he took her off to bed.


End file.
